Building inspires geographic creativity

What’s in a name? A lot of things if you’re talking the name “Portland.”

We got a news release about the groundbreaking of a 12-story apartment building at the corner of Third Street and Eighth Avenue in downtown St. Petersburg.

The $17.7 million project is scheduled to open by this time next year with 68 “affordable” units, according to the release from Jonathan Moore of Rojo Architecture in Tampa. The exact rental rates were not immediately available.

But what really caught our eye is the name of the project — The Portland — and Moore’s description.

“The Portland takes its name from the seaside city in Oregon,” his release states. “ROJO’s interpretation of Portland’s ocean cliffs are displayed in the face of the building and its elevator tower, with striations and a peeling of the face to reveal rich blues and greens in the glass and metalwork.”

Seaside city?

Ocean cliffs?

I checked with my colleague Wendy Culverwell at the Portland Business Journal, who confirmed that her city is 100 miles east of the Pacific coast.

The city has river cliffs on the Columbia River with residential development on the top and industrial development, including a Superfund site, on the bottom.

So I checked back with Moore.

“The term ‘seaside’ is indeed a loose artistic interpretation,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The City of Portland, Oregon traces back to the Isle of Portland in the Dorset Coast of U.K. The coast of Oregon shares very similar ‘inverted cliff’ profiles as the more famous cliffs of Dorset, so by abstracting this form we intended to acknowledge all things Portland.”

Got that?

But Moore better be careful about saying “all things Portland.”

A check of Wikipedia reveals there are cities named Portland not only in Oregon and Maine but also in more than a dozen other states, including Arkansas, Texas, Ohio and Wisconsin, as well as Portlands in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Jamaica and New Zealand.

Wonder if any of those places have an apartment building named the St. Petersburg.